President Obama has joined much of Official Washington in mistranslating a comment by Iran’s President Ahmadinejad into the provocative phrase, “wiping Israel off the map.” Obama’s falsehood recalls President George W. Bush’s bogus claim about Iraq seeking uranium in Africa.

In June 2007, Middle East expert and University of Michigan professor
Juan Cole remarked that bad translations can sometimes start wars.
Professor Cole, in this case, was referring to the misleading, yet
widely circulated mistranslated remark by Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad during a speech in 2005 — in which he is purported to have
said that Israel should be "wiped off the map.”

This old canard — long dismissed by Persian language experts as a
gross distortion of Ahmadinejad’s actual words — is regularly trotted
out by Israeli leaders and their supporters as proof that Iran’s regime
intends genocide against Israel, thereby justifying a military attack on
Iran.

However, a literal translation of Ahmadinejad’s 2005 statement would
be something like "this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the
page of time,” a reference back to an earlier statement made by
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of Iran’s Islamic Republic, as
Guardian columnist Jonathan Steele explained in 2006.

Ahmadinejad essentially was predicting that Israel’s rule over
Jerusalem would eventually come to an end, much like the once mighty
Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s. He and other Iranian leaders
have repeated similar predictions since then, but without any
suggestion that Iran would attack Israel. [For more, see "Wiped Off the Map - the Rumour of the Century" by Arash Norouzi.]

Earlier this month, Dan Meridor, Israel’s minister of intelligence and atomic energy, conceded the point in an interview
with Al Jazeera. He agreed that Iranian leaders "didn’t say, ‘We’ll
wipe [Israel] out,’ you’re right, but [said instead] ‘it will not
survive. It is a cancerous tumor, it should be removed.’ They repeatedly
said ‘Israel is not legitimate, it should not exist.’”

Though the "wiped off the map” phrase is a myth, it has been
transformed into accepted wisdom in Official Washington by its endless
repetition and remains a frequent refrain of U.S. politicians and the
corporate media.

For instance, in an appearance last month on MSNBC, Mark Landler, the
New York Times’ White House correspondent, said, "The Israelis feel the
window for that [denying Iran the capability to build nuclear weapons]
is closing and it’s closing really fast, and if they allow it to close
without taking military action, they would find themselves in a position
where the Iranians suddenly are in possession of nuclear weapons, which
they’ve threatened already to use against Israel.” [Emphasis added]

The last part of Landler’s comment was an apparent reference to the
Ahmadinejad misquote, with the made-up addendum that Iran has threatened
to use nuclear weapons to wipe Israel off the map. In fact, Iran has
not threatened to use a nuclear bomb against Israel and has even
disavowed any intent of developing a nuclear bomb. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s "Sloppy Comments on Iran’s ‘Nukes.’”]

Also, last month, President Barack Obama repeated the "wiped off the
map” fiction in front of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee
(to considerable applause), all the while assuring his audience of his
preference for diplomacy in dealing with Tehran. In his speech, Obama
said: "Let’s begin with a basic truth that you all understand: no
Israeli government can tolerate a nuclear weapon in the hands of a
regime that … threatens to wipe Israel off the map.”

If President Obama were truly interested in the success of diplomatic
engagement with Iran, then why would he continue to issue provocative
and propagandistic lies about Iran, especially before the start
of delicate negotiations between Iran and the UN P5 +1 (Security Council
members plus Germany) regarding Iran’s nuclear facilities?

Loose talk and inflammatory propaganda can only cheapen the United
States’ international image, inflicting preemptive harm on whatever
prospects for diplomatic progress might be in the offing.

The President’s use of a discredited phrase also brings to mind the
careless language depicting a "mushroom cloud” bandied about by
then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice as part of President
George W. Bush’s effort to whip the American public into a frenzy of
pro-war hysteria against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

The late Walter Lippman referred to such tactics as "the manufacture
of consent.” Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, called it
"the Big Lie,” that is, a phrase which, if repeated often enough, would
eventually pass for the truth.

Having an Iranian leader call into question the legitimacy of the
Zionist system of government in Israel and predicting its eventual
decline, of course, may be very insulting and offensive to the
powers-that-be in Israel, but it is a far cry from a call to attack or
wipe out the Israeli population.

This important nuance — acknowledged by no less than a member of the
Israeli cabinet — seems to be missing from the discourse of U.S.
corporate media and U.S. politicians. Instead, Ahmadinejad’s criticism
of Israel has been deliberately distorted, mistranslated and spun out of
context into a physical threat against Israel, ignoring the available
factual information that indicates otherwise.

Come to think of it, how did such an inaccurate phrase manage to worm
its way into the text of President Obama’s speech to AIPAC? As a rule,
presidential speeches are carefully reviewed by experts at the White
House, National Security Council and National Intelligence Council for
integrity and accuracy. After all, especially in high-profile speeches,
the President’s reputation is at stake.

The intelligence officers involved in vetting a speech would have
ready access to the Open Source Center’s translation of Ahmadinejad’s
2005 speech from the Persian if they had wanted to ensure the accuracy
of the President’s words. Whoever allowed this piece of propaganda to
slip through either committed a grave error or had a separate agenda in
mind.

This episode brings to mind the criticism of former President Bush
for including in his 2003 State of the Union speech a falsehood about
Iraq trying to procure yellowcake uranium from Africa – a fiction
that helped lead the nation into a costly war and that
subsequently brought an apology from CIA Director George Tenet.

In any case, President Obama’s gaffe before AIPAC has certainly done
nothing to burnish his reputation (despite the applause it received at
the time) because much of the world knows better.

we should bomb Israel and Larijani has cefairild that it is not our policy and certainly not militarily. What he meant was that the good will prevail on evil in the end. This is a Shiite Islam worldview and is not literal nor is it immediate. The shiite Imams were killed centuries ago and the Shiite Islam is still in hope of eventual victory over those who have usurped their rule. However, the nuclear technology is of far more strategic importance without even being used for weapon development. Iran has no nuclear weapons and it is agreed among experts that they are not yet building weapons. The point is that I feel that the question of weapon development will never become crucial as we are going to be bombed far before the capabality is matured.So the whole point is? Well, everyone can form his or her opinion on why a counry chooses to go down the road to destruction. It is not easy to figure this out and it needs considerable knowledge about the world and most importantly about the people who live in this world. I have formed my own ideas.In my current old age there are very few things that can impress me, but still it is pleasantly interesting to be treated to kind words, good cop,,, you know what, it is the right thing to do, just like the war itself.